Hussein Banai, associate professor of international studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, has published a major analytical essay in Democracy Seminar examining the ongoing U.S.-Iran war—not as a conventional foreign policy event, but as an expression of the authoritarian consolidation underway inside the United States itself.
The essay, titled “A War of Interregnum,” published March 23, 2026, in the journal produced in collaboration with The New School and the European Democracy Institute, opens with a premise that sets it apart from conventional commentary: this is the first major war the United States has initiated during a regime change at home. While American and Israeli forces conduct large-scale bombardment against Iran, Banai observes, the administration prosecuting that war has simultaneously been dismantling the institutional architecture of the American state—sidelining the policy process, subordinating the intelligence community, and concentrating national security authority in a circle of loyalists.
Drawing on his deep expertise in Iranian politics, U.S.-Iran relations, and democratic theory, Banai traces the logic that made Iran the target. Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE—were able to purchase a measure of protection through financial tribute and symbolic gestures the administration could claim as wins. Iran had no such capacity: no sovereign wealth fund to redirect, no investment architecture to mobilize, and the added liability of having signed a nuclear agreement with the Obama administration. The transactional calculus that governed Trump’s foreign policy in every other case simply had no equivalent in Tehran.
The essay also examines the nuclear justification for the war with particular precision. Banai documents the gap between the administration’s declaration that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “obliterated” after the June 2025 conflict and subsequent Pentagon assessments indicating a delay of only one to two years—a discrepancy, he notes, that went entirely unaccounted for when a second, larger war began nine months later using the same justification.
Banai closes with an observation about strategic asymmetry that speaks directly to his long-standing scholarly interests in regime survival and political development. The Trump administration treats foreign policy as an extractive enterprise, measuring success by tribute paid and humiliation delivered. It has now engaged an adversary that has spent 47 years developing a political culture and security apparatus oriented entirely around surviving existential threats. “History’s ledger on wars begun by states in transition is not encouraging,” Banai writes.
The essay reflects the kind of work that defines Banai’s contribution to the Department of International Studies: rigorous analysis that moves between political theory and current events, situating immediate crises within longer historical and institutional frames. It joins his broader body of scholarship on U.S.-Iran relations, including Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), and speaks to the Hamilton Lugar School’s core mission of producing scholarship that illuminates the forces shaping global order at moments of acute uncertainty.
Read the essay: “A War of Interregnum” — Democracy Seminar, March 23, 2026